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Saturday, 2 January 2016

Researching 1682 - Gillian Polack

My New Year’s resolution is about a novel. It’s is set in
1682, in England and France and is due with my publisher in 2017. It will take
me that long to write because it’s a very historical novel and I’m doing
something rather special with the research. Several rather special things, in
fact, but I’ll talk about just the one aspect here.

As you may know, I’m a Medieval historian/literary historian
(someone asked me which I was the other day, and I’m both – they’re quite
different things, however, so it’s important to be clear). I’m having to get
deep knowledge of a whole new era. To write this novel, I
need to reach a high level of understanding.

When I was looking at world geography the other night, I was
trying to work out how different people with slightly different backgrounds would
see the world. Would they know about Australia? Or would they only know the known
continents?

In the process I discovered that some people described two unknown
territories: north and south. North included Greenland and was called terra
borealis incognita (unknown land of the north). The far south included New Zealand and
New Holland, but no-one yet know the complete coastline of either (or indeed,
if they were separated) and they were part of terra australis incognita (unknown
land of the south).

I also discovered that I’d been going about the “New World”
and Old World” entirely wrongly for the novel. New World is the Americas and included,
in 1682, settlements such as New England (where the real witches were, according
to an English pamphlet on witchcraft from the very late 1600s – the witches in
England were innocent of actual witchcraft – this reminds me of a conversation I
had in Normandy many years ago. “The real witches are not in our region,” I was
told by a local, “but in the next one along”) but the Old World was Asia,
which included China and Mesopotamia. It extended right into the Middle East.

This was the very modern geography, the one my learned and up-to-date
intellectual character will carry with her. She’ll know the exact date each bit
of coastline on what’s now Western Australia was mapped. My more traditionally-educated
character won’t care about any land in the south and will name a shorter list
of continents. My non-literate character will know her close world very well
indeed, but will have much vaguer concepts of the bigger world.

That was two hours' work. I’ll check it with modern studies later
on. Right now, however, what I’m doing with this research is sorting out the
world from within the world view with a view to writing it from that direction.
I’m reading hundreds and hundreds of primary sources. A couple of days ago I collected
data on how far it took to get from one place to another and what sights could
be seen on the way. My travellers have a route, you see, and they’re only going
to see things that were on that route in 1682, or that I can reasonably place there
given the literature of the time.

By ‘the literature of the time’ I don’t just mean geographies
and travel literature and digests of distances between places. While the 1680s
were wonderful because people produced all this information and much, more– they
were besotted with their world and they described it in exquisite detail - that’s
not all I’m looking for. I’m using a different interpretation of the universe
to the one we usually use when we describe the seventeenth century. Reading
about witches is just as important as knowing the actual measure from
Huntingdon to London and how long it took to travel.

I’ve collected electronic copies of books and pamphlets that talk about prodigies
and witchcraft and magic of all sorts. When we look at the seventeenth century we
often dismiss all these thing as a product of the time and assume that, sine we don't have that belief and since we're rational, rational
people from the period won’t believe in them either. We remake the world in our
own image. No angels, no demonic possession, no bargains with the Devil, no
fairykind, no divine retribution. There were some people in the seventeenth
century who believed in this, that the world was the kind of place we tend to
see it as.

I don’t want to write a novel about a rational world. I want
to write a novel where magic is real, where one has to be cautious in life not
only because of the lingering effects of the Civil War but because of the
constant interplay between the non-human and the human. I want to understand
how someone could note down, in all seriousness, that a man bargained with the
Devil and so the Devil entered into his wife’s ear. I want to understand the consequences
of these bargains and how this related to the constant and vast and violent argument between
Catholicism and Protestantism.

I want this novel to be about the every day, not about the big
events. This is why the immersion. I need to understand how all kinds of different
people in 1682 perceived their world and then I need to make it real. This is
my New Year resolution, to make my version of 1682 real and bring those characters
to life.

If anyone is interested, I’m happy to document some of the
more interesting aspects in my History Girls’ posts. Not every month. Just when
fascinating stuff arises to be documented. Let me know! Another side of this
novel is that I’m documenting processes. I can document some of the more fascinating ones here, but only if people want to read them.

The three settings for the novel are St Ives (near
Cambridge), London, and Paris. I walked Cheapside using a seventeenth century
map in 2014: my first steps for the novel. Now everything is being done from
Australia, and our seasons are inverse and the world looks quite different. It’s
thirty degrees Celsius outside right now, and oddly, that helps me discover the
inverse world I need for my novel. To write about it here, or not to write
about it here: the question is for you to answer.

6 comments:

Gillian, Sounds fascinating. It is an interesting concept having the three levels of education reflected, and three 'sizes' of concept of the world knowledge reflected. Brochures and pamphlets of the time, and books, you I assume are a faster reader than me.I would love you to share fascinating discoveries along the way.

I'll have more types of background reflected. Each of my key characters, in fact. I used those 3 to illustrate because they have instant differences in terms of how the world is seen, globally. That's the teacher in me. The writer in me in subtler and the historian loves reading!

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